Gyanodaya. Gyan means wisdom; odaya means rise -- the rise of wisdom... just like the sunrise.

Wisdom has nothing to do with knowledge. Knowledge is a pretender: it only pretends to be wisdom. It is very deceptive, it is not the true thing. There is nothing substantial in it, all is superficial. But knowledge deceives many people because it is available very cheaply. It is available without any risk; it is available without any sacrifice, it is available without any effort.

Wisdom is not so cheap. It is the costliest thing in the world because one has to sacrifice oneself in attaining it. It is attained only through that price. One cannot withhold oneself even a little bit, one has to surrender oneself totally. Hence the risk is great: one is going into the unknown, risking all that is known, and there is no guarantee what is going to happen. There may be truth, there may not be. There may be God, there may not be. And the mind goes on creating all kinds of suspicions, doubts.

Wisdom needs great trust, great courage, guts, and a deep longing to know -- so deep that it cannot be satisfied by mere information. Then one searches, not in the scriptures, but in one's own consciousness. Then the method is not study but meditation, not thinking but just the opposite of thinking, a state of no-thought.

Knowledge is accumulation of thought; wisdom is dissolution of thought.

And the moment wisdom arises in you, it is the sunrise. All darkness disappears. When you become settled and rooted in your consciousness there is no darkness anywhere. Life is full of light and full of delight.

The original source of all tension is becoming. One is always trying to be something; no one is at ease with himself as he is. The being is not accepted, the being is denied, and something else is taken as an ideal to become. So the basic tension is always between that which you are and that which you long to become.

You desire to become something. Tension means that you are not pleased with what you are, and you long to be what you are not. Tension is created between these two. What you desire to become is irrelevant. If you want to become wealthy, famous, powerful, or even if you want to be free, liberated, to be divine, immortal, even if you long for salvation, moksha, then too the tension will be there.

Anything that is desired as something to be fulfilled in the future, against you as you are, creates tension. The more impossible the ideal is, the more tension there is bound to be. So a person who is a materialist is ordinarily not so tense as one who is religious, because the religious person is longing for the impossible, for the far-off. The distance is so great that only a great tension can fill the gap.

Tension means a gap between what you are and what you want to be. If the gap is great, the tension will be great. If the gap is small, the tension will be small.

And if there is no gap at all, it means you are satisfied with what you are. In other words, you do not long to be anything other than what you are. Then your mind exists in the moment. There is nothing to be tense about; you are at ease with yourself. You are in the Tao. To me, if there is no gap you are religious; you are in the dharma.

Pooja thanks for your liking! It is all HIS...thank HIM...It is because of HIM that beautiful thoughts comes into man's mind. HE speaks through beautiful hearts. One more thought...

Deva means divine, sambhava means possibility, potentiality -- the possibility of the divine. God is not something that is available ready-made; it is your potential. You can actualise it, but you can miss it also.

Man is like a seed: the seed has the potential to become the tree, but only the potential. It is not yet the tree; it can miss also. And millions of people go on missing. They are born as seeds, they live as seeds, they die as seeds; they never bloom, they never become self-actualised people.

Religion is nothing but the science of self-actualisation. It is the method of transforming the potential into the real. It is the greatest art.

We call a man a great artist if he can transform a stone into a beautiful statue. We call a man a great painter if he can transform an empty canvas into a beautiful painting. But the greatest art is to transform your inner potential into actuality.

Man is born as a tabula rasa, empty, a canvas. The painting is possible, but it will depend on you what shape, what form, it will take. It is your choice, it is your responsibility. Don't take life for granted. That's how many people are missing, they think just being born is enough. It is not: it is only a beginning of a great journey. The real has yet to happen.

Become aware that you are a seed. Become aware that the seed has a great potential to become a tree, that it can bloom in a thousand and one flowers, and that unless it is attained the work remains unfinished.

And one cannot feel fulfilled unless it is actualised, unless all that is possible is actualised. When your whole potential has become the real, that is the moment of great bliss. Then one has arrived, and only then is there rest and contentment and fulfilment.

Ramesh ji i was just reading your last post..its very beautiful.. yes its very true that purpose of life is realising one's own worth & potential...& then we give ourselves the chance to enjoy this bliss called life...its not enough to just live but we should grow every moment.....i just hope that such understanding gets imbibed well by today's generation....

Atita means the transcendental. Reality is not finished at that which is apparent, at that which is obvious. Reality goes far deeper. Reality is not confined to the known, it reaches into the unknown. Reality is not only that which is available to the senses; it is far bigger. All that we know of reality is through our five senses. There are animals who have only three senses; their reality is confined to three. They cannot even become aware that there are people who have five senses and whose reality is bigger. There are animals who have only one sense; their reality is even more small. If man had ten senses his reality would be far richer.

Just think of a blind man. In his reality there is no place for light, no place for colour; his reality is very poor.

Without colour, without light, he is living in a very small cell. He is missing great beauties. He will not be able to see the splendour of a rainbow, he cannot even imagine it. You cannot explain it to him -- there is no way! And whatsoever you say he will misunderstand because he will be constantly translating it according to his understanding, and his understanding is confined to his ears. Now, what the eyes can know cannot be translated into the language of the ears; you cannot see music and you cannot hear beauty.

Don't think that we are confined to five senses. This is the beginning of religion. There is far more to be known, to be explored, and once you start exploring it, you start growing new senses, new sensibilities, in you, and that is the whole miracle of the religious search.

Once you start exploring something, some potential in you which has been dormant starts functioning. Now the brain surgeons say that half of the brain is almost non-functioning. The ancient Yoga scriptures say that that half is far more important than the other half which is functioning. The lower half is functioning, the higher half is non-functioning. It will function only if you start doing something for which it is needed. For example, when a person starts meditating some new centres in his brain start functioning. They were never needed, they remained dormant.

There is no end to human potentialities.

Man has all that is needed to know the whole. But the basic thing is to remember that we are just at the beginning of the journey and much has to be done, much has to be known, much has to be loved, much has to be lived.

That is the meaning of the transcendental: that there is always something beyond us, waiting, calling. Hear the call of it! It is significant only if you start moving into the transcendental, into that which is not available to the ordinary senses. It is all your birthright, but one has to grow new sensibilities, and meditation is a new sensibility. It makes you aware of the beyond, of the infinite, of the eternal.

If you go on fasting for a longer time the body by and by relaxes into a kind of dullness. It starts accepting, it adjusts itself; there is no point. There is nobody who takes care, so what is the point of going on crying? The body becomes dumb. You lose sensitivity, you become thick. You grow a thick skin around yourself: then the hot and the cold do not bother you, then starvation does not bother you. Rather, on the contrary, you feel very good deep inside -- that you are conquering. But you are not conquering, you are losing ground. Each moment you are losing ground, because truth can only be known through the body! Truth is known by the consciousness but known THROUGH the body. One has to remain rooted in the body.

God Himself is rooted in the world. Take a tree out of the soil and it will die. The life of the tree is intertwined with the life of the earth: it needs water, it needs manure, it needs food, it needs the sun, the air, the wind. Those are natural needs, the tree exists through them. Take the tree out of the soil -- for a few days maybe you may not notice that the tree is dying, the old water that it had contained in itself may keep it a little bit green, even a few buds may open, a few flowers may bloom, but not for long -- sooner or later the reservoirs of the tree will be finished and the tree will die.

Take yourself out of your body and you will die. Your body is your earth. Your body belongs to the earth, it has come from the earth, it is a small earth around you. It nourishes you, it is not your enemy. It is not in the hands of the Devil. There is no Devil: the Devil is a creation of the pathological mind, the Devil is the creation of the paranoid mind. It has come into the world because of fear. But your so-called God is also out of fear; so your God and your Devil are both out of your fear. You have not known the real God. The real God is not out of fear. The real God is out of love, out of joy. The real God can only be experienced by becoming more and more sensitive, by becoming more and more open.

Be in your body. Get out of your mind and get into your senses: that is the only way to be religious. It will look paradoxical, but let me say it: the only way to be religious is to be in the world, and deeply in the world -- because God is hidden in the world. There is no 'other world'. The other world is the deepest core of this world, it is not separate from it.

The authentic wisdom does not come from outside. The authentic wisdom comes when you have gone deeper into your being and found the center of your life -- then suddenly an explosion. Everything that you do or don't do expresses your wisdom.

Wisdom is just the fragrance of a rose. Find the rose first and the fragrance will be found on its own accord. Don't even make the distinction of which comes first, because they are not two.

They are one, looked at from two sides -- one from inside and one from outside. Whatever is your enlightenment expresses itself inside as meditation, and outside as wisdom. Neither comes first, they are one. The outer and the inner both are together.

But mind always creates distinctions, separations. And it is because of the mind that you get into unnecessary troubles: philosophic conflicts, theological arguments. You waste your time on books looking for something that may help you to find yourself.

You cannot find, anywhere, anything that will help you to find yourself. You have to be clear about it: you are not to be found, you are already here. You have just to recognize the fact.

A master does not teach you to be yourself; he simply makes you recognize what is hidden behind your heartbeat. In his presence a certain synchronicity happens. You simply be close to a master, silently, and you start feeling a rush of energy flowing towards you, making you afire. It is invisible to the spectators; only the participants are the blessed ones.

Once you know yourself, you are in meditation and your actions will show wisdom.

Flexibility is taught by nature. You will see the trees bend in the wind. You will see that tree branches are flexible. To be rigid is to break. When we have life problems it is good for us to be flexible. Sometimes we need to flow with what is going on. If we resist, it becomes more painful. We need to be on the path of least resistance. Water flows down the mountain through the path of least resistance. Electricity flows through the path of least resistance. Power flows through the path of least resistance.

There is no such thing as instant improvement in life. And as you know in agriculture, growth can only happen little by little over time...The things that you do daily may seem small and insignificant, but over the time people will be surprised to learn how much you have grown in life. Focus on the small things you do daily. The key word here is daily. If you do not have the persistence to do these small things consistently, you won't be able to see the results over the long term.